THE CLUB

by Steven & Robert Jon Cohen Gaines ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 1980

Imagine what sort of ""novel"" a former bartender at N.Y.'s Studio 54 (coauthor Cohen) would be most likely to write--and, provided your imagination is sleazy enough, you'll be able to predict every page of this virtually plotless garbage-arama. The Club is ""a discotheque so narcotic in its pleasure-giving ability that it had become the most famous nightclub of all time."" And those pleasures detailed here include Quaaludes, cocaine, public sex, beefcake bartenders, plus, of course, Famous People galore. Some of the celebrities appear as themselves (names often misspelled), some under transparent and/or silly pseudonyms (including at least one borrowed from Valley of the Dolls)--like flamboyantly homosexual designer Ellison, who loathes jeans designer Alvin Duff, ""a Jew from Brooklyn who pretended he was straight. . . but who was just as big a fairy as everybody else""; or the Club's owner Stuart Shorter, who's into orgythreesomes and has legal troubles with the FBI. And amid all the namedropping and swell repartee (""You know why I was with you? Because you were once in your mother's cunt!""), two lead characters muckily emerge: bartender Bobby, having an affair with the older First Lady of Broadway (""Do you know how humiliating it is just to be a body and not a person?""); and Jacky Mellon, Minelli-esque daughter of a legendary dead singer, who--while rehearsing for a Broadway show called The Performance with her disapproving Italian-American movie-director lover (""You and your faggot friends at that discotheque, taking drugs, fucking each other. . ."")--contracts syphilis via anal sex with a chorus boy and discovers her teeth are cracked because of excess cocaine consumption. ""Snort and suck. Snort and suck. Sometimes The Club was so boring."" Sometimes? A runaway favorite in the race for Most Worthless Book of the Year.

Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Morrow

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1980

Categories: FICTION